Civitatis - Secture

Civitatis is a Spanish online platform for tourist activities. Based in Madrid, it sells tours, excursions, tickets to tourist attractions and other activities.

The challenge

Due to the way the civitatis search engine was built, there were some results that were not the most optimal for users.

The search engine was not able to correctly find the place where the activity was to be carried out. Results appeared in other places or similar results that did not have the precision that the business needed for the users.

Therefore, the search engine update was needed to find more optimal results for users.

The solution

Secture made several proposals:

The first was to perform a separate search in 2 parts, the first asking the place where the user was going to travel and the second asking the type of experience the user wanted to perform.
The second proposal was to perform a combined search but to improve the search parameters so that the results would be more precise.

The business decided to opt for the second option because the user experience was better, although it was technically more complex and the results less accurate than the first option.

The development

The development we did at Secture to try to improve the search engine results was as follows:

Perform a search with the parameters that the user had entered looking to see if we saw any results that matched what the user was looking for to locate a place.
If a location was not found in the user's search, we searched all locations.
If a location was found, we would perform a search with the rest of the query but filtering by the location found.

With this logic we managed to improve certain results although in other cases we still had accuracy problems.